“Seventy years ago when the soccer economy was based on ticket sales, the president of Real Madrid built a huge stadium to house 120,000 people,” said Jose Angel Sanchez, CEO of Real Madrid. “He thought that having biggest stadium would provide the biggest revenues so he could be able to acquire rights to biggest players in the world. That’s exactly what Santiago Bernabéu did. Now we have over 450 million fans so we have to build the virtual stadium to put them all in, and understand what they are expecting from us so the club can benefit from what they want.”

That virtual stadium is in a form of an app, released last week for the iOS, Android and Windows Phone.

“Fans will be able to see the replay of multiple camera angles inside and outside the stadium, they can adjust 250 statistics and compare team to team or player to player in real time. And the app will learn behaviors by itself so we can continue to make it better”, said Orlando Ayala, Microsoft Chairman of Emerging Markets.

The application is equipped with features such as game highlights, match summaries, exclusive video content, news, player cards, Real Madrid TV, and links to shop and ticketing services.

The app already has over 1 million downloads and a 4.6 rating on Google’s app store. Real Madrid’s final La Liga game on May 23 against Getafe was users’ first gameday experience with the app.